Reballing LGA-152 NAND Chips
Often, we have to reball LGA-152 NAND chips to swap them from one PCB to another. For example, from a bad circuit board to a donor circuit board. This is an example reballing a Micron NW657 NAND Chip with 0.40mm…
Repair Broken SanDisk Cruzer Connectors
If you don’t know how to fix it yourself you can send the flash drive in for data recovery. We offer competitive pricing and FREE shipping anywhere within the United States. Simply fill out a work order and mail the…
Monolithic Flash Drive Recovery – Solving Difficult Cases
Newer monolithic flash drives are proving more difficult to recover than ever. One reason is due to multiple duplicate copper traces used to fish signals from the controller down to the NAND flash memory chip. I’ve found the best way…
Hidden Hynix DDR Enable Command
While sniffing traffic on a Hynix NAND chip (H27Q1T08EM6R ID: ad 3c 19 a3) we found a hidden command to change the read mode from NON-DDR to DDR which effectively doubles the read throughput of the chip. Cmd 0xEF Addr…
Monolithic Flash Drive Recovery – A Basic How To
Ever wondered what goes into solving a monolithic data recovery case? Here is a brief explanation of what we do to recover data from monolithic flash drives.
Micro-Soldering Example
We recently received a USB flash drive with missing legs on the controller microchip. Rather than source an identical chip or go the off-chip route we decided to fix it by removing a small portion of the silicon substrate and…
How to tell if you have a monolithic flash drive
Monolithic flash drives are similar to traditional flash drives in structure, however, their components are encased in a ceramic case preventing easy access to the NAND flash memory chip storing its data. Monolithic flash drives are cheaper to assemble, more…
Creating a PHPUnit framework for WordPress plugins
WordPress is a great platform, we use it to streamline workflow and keep costs down. Here is a little tutorial on how to setup PHPUnit testing for WordPress plugin development. Setting up the framework can be a nuisance and I’ve…
How Flash Drives Fail
Updated for 2018: Flash media is very robust but it can fail. Flash drives are like mini computers, they have a controller which has a CPU, RAM, EEPROM, and GPIO embedded in it. When the flash drive is inserted the…
[SOLVED] SD Card Recovery & Repair
If your SD card is no longer functional you need to send it to a data recovery company. Here are some common faults to look at before trying to fix or repair your damaged SD card. With the exception of…